What good does it do to help your kids out if your existence is permanently terminated and you cannot appreciate the results of your actions? Most advocates of cryonics are either atheists or people who rationally suspect that death might actually be as permanent as it appears, with no form of afterlife.
Cryonics : by preserving the information in the brain it should be possible for future people to rebuild a person or to copy the information into another form.
Religion : by giving telepathic information to a deity that no one can perceive, you might be spared after death
Unfreezing is a conceptually simple thing to understand, although of course we are missing the tools to do it today. But we can describe how the tools would work, and point to existing examples of such tools in nature to state with near absolute certainty that such tools are possible and practical.
The tools we need used to be called "nanotechnology", now are called "molecular manufacturing". We need the technology to make any arbitrary object atom by atom, and it's pretty straightforward from there.
I personally am pretty confident that cryonics works. Yes, I have a degree in a related field and I am working on an MD. When I say "works", I mean that if a patient is frozen with a well oxygenated brain within a short time period following legal death (the heart stops), and cryoprotectants are used, then I am confident that nearly all personality and memories are preserved.
The person needs to be kept cold for 100-200 years. Already, there are people that have been kept frozen for 40 years, so this is not implausible.
I think that within a few hundred years humanity will develop technology so advanced as to be approaching the limits allowed by physics. (by developing means to enhance human intelligence that are rapidly self improving)
I don't think that any cataclysm is likely to stop us, because the earth has had a survivable biosphere for 3 billion years.
And that's just it - the earth has not been subject to a gamma ray burst or any other biosphere sterilizing event in 3 BILLION YEARS that it took for humans to evolve. The universe is only 14 billion years old! And the earth is a planet on the outer part of the galaxy, where it is more stable. And in the past, a few billion years after the big bang, planets with the complexity and variety of elements needed to form organized self replicating life like we perceive it didn't exist. And gamma ray bursts and other nasty events would have been far more common, as the universe had a much higher density.
That's the true explanation for the Fermi "paradox" : it is only a paradox to those unaware of just how long evolution took to get to this point, and how evolution is a process that can easily develop in a direction that never led to our form of intelligence.
Does this really mean that visible light invisibility shielding is actually possible? Over the years, whenever I saw an article on this, I just yawned and assumed that the laws of physics wouldn't really allow someone to make a real device that could not be detected by some wavelengths of light.
However, I'm going to assume that a practical real world application of the technology will require another tech called 'molecular manufacturing' as a prerequisite. I'm guessing that to cloak a macroscopic object from visible light you'll need to create a shield with atomic level precision. And forget cloaking a person, probably - a shield would need to be a rigid object and there's probably an upper limit to how large it could be. I'm thinking that the insect sized spy drones of the future could be made totally invisible to the naked eye, however.
Attacking missiles probably could do that. That's why you have the gatling gun mounted right next to the laser for the missiles that get through. And in any case, no weapon system can ever be a perfect counter to everything. There's always going to be trade-offs.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the Navy plans to use the energy weapon AND the conventional bullets in the same weapon system. The actual ships with these lasers will have BOTH. The reason they have both is because the laser is expected to have several times the effective range of the bullets so it'll be able to shoot at targets that are farther away, and THEN the conventional weapons will open up if the target missile or artillery round manages to get close enough.
I think a greater range is an overwhelming advantage and worth researching, assuming we are going to be spending billions of dollars on defense every year. The Navy also thinks it could be used to zap cheap UAVs and other low threat, slow targets at a long range without having to waste a multi-million dollar antiaircraft missile. (also, a laser shot would use up a trivial amount of the ship's fuel, while once a destroyer fires a missile that missile is gone until it can be reloaded)
This just in : spend $1200 on a graphics card and you'll get a card that destroys everything else on benchmarks! (til next month) And you'll have to wait 3 solid years before games are out that really need the card!
For a billionaire, 60 grand is not even 1/100 of a percent of their total fortune. Not to mention that they could have google pay for the screen because technically messing around with 4k resolution is a business expense....(even if Larry or Sergey were using it to view equine pornography)
Hydrogen isn't happening. The only reason there's any interest at all in elemental hydrogen as a form of energy storage is that it's a neat trick of chemistry that produces water as a product. But it's so much more convenient to attack those hydrogens to some carbon molecules. The easiest way to do this synthetically is to make methane/natural gas and use that. CNG vehicles are a mature technology that is not significantly more expensive than gasoline.
And of course, long chain hydrocarbons are an even better way to store hydrogen, in a nice compact liquid form like gasoline or diesel.
The article writers made 2 major mistakes that cause their results to be meaningless.
1. They didn't secure erase the drive, which is what actually puts a drive back into a virgin state. They instead wrote zeroes to every sector, which means that the drive controller probably still thinks those zeroed out sectors are still in use.
2. The Samsung drive controller has a form of self cleanup that greatly reduces the need for TRIM.
3. Regardless, the SSD they used was slow as a dog and barely worth using over a HDD.
A good case is an 'option' that appears to solve all the major problems with the iphone. A good case would protect the glass back from most impact and scratch damage, allow you to grip the phone better, and would insulate the metal antenna from your sweaty palms. Technically that means that the sweet industrial design of the phone would be semi-wasted since you are wrapping the hard glass and metal lines of the device in a swaddling of generic rubber.
The trouble is, most of these "problems" of your HAVE easy and readily achievable solutions. There just isn't the mainstream interest in the problem or the will to use the right solution.
-For malaria, drug companies could easily come up with several drugs that work together to block both malaria in it's current form and to effectively stop evolution of the parasite against the drug. If you want to know how this could be accomplished, reply and I'll explain. It would merely cost about a billion per drug, and would have to be paid for by the Western world, not the the people it would protect.
-Tons of ways for the energy production. Simplest to understand is wide scale nuclear built in a rational manner with the reactors located far from populated areas.
-I don't see mathematical puzzles as worth of solving if the solution accomplishes nothing of value. (but maybe break encryption, which will become moot in another decade once large scale flash memory storage is so cheap and ubiquitous that everyone uses one-time-pad for all important encryption)
-Feeding modern populations is again easy for those with modern societies. For a high tech society, we could eventually cover our country with 2 story greenhouses if we wanted. Again, the poor and backwards are a different problem that can't be solved with current engineering.
-Don't make me laugh about this mars question. A really really big spaceship, with nuclear fission power and vasimr thrusters. That would have enough specific impulse to ALSO carry a huge lander with enough fuel for a mars landing. We could get all their gear down first the way we do it now. For the ascent stage, we could use locally made compressed methane and liquid oxygen. Straightforward engineering, and readily achievable - so long as we don't have to pay for the bureaucratic overhead of the NASA way.
- We make the transistors smaller, the same way we've been doing incrementally for the last 30 years.
Import Tariffs. The United States would charge a tariff on Chinese goods made in factories that were not up to OSHA standards. The inspectors for these standards would be INDEPENDENT people probably chosen from an international pool.
This particular drug had no rational evidence for toxicity. It was an old drug candidate for something else back in the 70s, and in high dose testing on animals no lethal level was found. It did cure about 1 in 3 hospice patients during phase I trials. However, because it was for a rare type of cancer that only about 200 people have in the U.S. at any time, it was very difficult to secure the necessary funding for the next phase. As far as I know, my professor is still working on it.
What upset me was obvious : the people this drug is for will die almost 100% of the time within 2-3 years. A 1 in 3 chance of surviving is worth it, especially since even with the limited Phase I data, there were no adverse events detected. Basic math : if 30 or so randomly chosen people don't have adverse events, the rate of adverse events is fairly low within a 95% confidence interval. No further testing is needed : this drug isn't intended for anyone but people with a terminal illness, and there should be a way to put it into immediate use for that.
Wonder drug could save human lives left, right, and center. FDA won't approve it without decades of testing because it's "too risky" to try an experimental drug out on patients who are likely to die anyway. Film at 11.
Seriously, I've seen lectures in medical school by several researchers who ALSO have wonder drugs like this one. They can stick up a diagram showing exactly which molecular pathway it blocks in tumors. They can show Phase I results where 1 in 3 terminal patients in a hospice goes into complete remission from their cancer. Guess what...the drug still cannot be used...
This theory is ignorant, and wrong. Think about it for a second. Suppose you have a large population of sentients : not just individual beings, but competing societies and civilizations. Now, some of these populations succumb to the lures of computer games and fast food and porn more than others do. What does this cause? DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS. The invisible hand of evolution correcting the problem, again. This may ultimately mean that the eventually 'victors' in the recent rat race (USians) lose to other societies that are better at breeding. (such as India)
No, the reason we don't see SETI signals is obvious. IF alien species are within our light cone, they are using communication systems that are indistinguishable from noise, since maximizing entropy in a radio signal allows you to pack the most data into an available slice of spectrum.
But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)
Not NEARLY the same. In this, you're firing live rounds! A recoil, a powerful bang, real bullets go through cover, etc. Could even come up with a sport where it would be a lone man on the course with a real gun versus a team of people controlling the robots. Kinda a Rambo challenge, where if a robot manages to shoot the lone player with a paintball the robot wins.
Can any economists comment? This actually makes a kind of sense. If you ask a kid to do some work (actually actively studying to rapidly learn IS work) you gotta pay em. Society would benefit quite a bit more than paying the kids would cost if the kids were to learn what they need to learn on a faster timescale. I'm positive that if the funding were there, kids of average intelligence could easily enter college at age 16 if they were to actually work hard at learning. I certainly was ready then.
This is actually an interesting mental challenge. Could one posit a scenario where the U.S. military was actually defeated by an adversary that didn't have comparable technology and/or resources? Historically, it has happened. The Chinese forces the U.S. to retreat in the Korean war because they had ludicrous numbers of infantry troops in the field. However, the U.S. did manage to defeat their forces after regrouping. In Vietnam and in Iraq, the enemy has the means to send a lot of young men home in a body bag. However, the blunt truth is, American civilians can breed more young males, and the military can train em into soldiers faster than the enemy can kill us. A few thousand dead a year is not enough casualties that our military would actually run out of troops, no matter how long the war was.
The only scenario I thought of where this happens is where the enemy develops some kind of breakthrough, singularity level technology before the United States. Maybe red tape and government regulation stop U.S. researchers from developing the tech first. Strong AI or high end nanotechnology or something.
Typical DARPA. They'll put research funding into any idea that they've seen on Star Trek or read in a book somewhere.
The problem with "Cyber attacks" and "cyber space" is that they are too darn easy to defend against. Protecting your computers and hardware against a software virus is about as easy as protecting yourself from nerf gun darts. People get careless, and hackers get through, but it requires incompetence on the part of the system admins to not isolate critical systems from the damn internet. Most of the credit card processor breaches occurred because the company running it didn't put basic barriers in between the computers with the card data and the internal company network.
So it's kinda far fetched to plan on 0wnzoring your opponent's radars remotely by sending out data packets taking advantage of an exploit that your opponent can just patch with a firmware upgrade.
Because a lot of people do believe there are innate rights and wrongs, and use this belief to force laws on the rest of us that have no basis in actuality as to right and wrong.
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What good does it do to help your kids out if your existence is permanently terminated and you cannot appreciate the results of your actions? Most advocates of cryonics are either atheists or people who rationally suspect that death might actually be as permanent as it appears, with no form of afterlife.
Cryonics : by preserving the information in the brain it should be possible for future people to rebuild a person or to copy the information into another form.
Religion : by giving telepathic information to a deity that no one can perceive, you might be spared after death
What is REALLY the irrational belief here?
Unfreezing is a conceptually simple thing to understand, although of course we are missing the tools to do it today. But we can describe how the tools would work, and point to existing examples of such tools in nature to state with near absolute certainty that such tools are possible and practical.
The tools we need used to be called "nanotechnology", now are called "molecular manufacturing". We need the technology to make any arbitrary object atom by atom, and it's pretty straightforward from there.
I personally am pretty confident that cryonics works. Yes, I have a degree in a related field and I am working on an MD. When I say "works", I mean that if a patient is frozen with a well oxygenated brain within a short time period following legal death (the heart stops), and cryoprotectants are used, then I am confident that nearly all personality and memories are preserved.
The person needs to be kept cold for 100-200 years. Already, there are people that have been kept frozen for 40 years, so this is not implausible.
I think that within a few hundred years humanity will develop technology so advanced as to be approaching the limits allowed by physics. (by developing means to enhance human intelligence that are rapidly self improving)
I don't think that any cataclysm is likely to stop us, because the earth has had a survivable biosphere for 3 billion years.
And that's just it - the earth has not been subject to a gamma ray burst or any other biosphere sterilizing event in 3 BILLION YEARS that it took for humans to evolve. The universe is only 14 billion years old! And the earth is a planet on the outer part of the galaxy, where it is more stable. And in the past, a few billion years after the big bang, planets with the complexity and variety of elements needed to form organized self replicating life like we perceive it didn't exist. And gamma ray bursts and other nasty events would have been far more common, as the universe had a much higher density.
That's the true explanation for the Fermi "paradox" : it is only a paradox to those unaware of just how long evolution took to get to this point, and how evolution is a process that can easily develop in a direction that never led to our form of intelligence.
Does this really mean that visible light invisibility shielding is actually possible? Over the years, whenever I saw an article on this, I just yawned and assumed that the laws of physics wouldn't really allow someone to make a real device that could not be detected by some wavelengths of light.
However, I'm going to assume that a practical real world application of the technology will require another tech called 'molecular manufacturing' as a prerequisite. I'm guessing that to cloak a macroscopic object from visible light you'll need to create a shield with atomic level precision. And forget cloaking a person, probably - a shield would need to be a rigid object and there's probably an upper limit to how large it could be. I'm thinking that the insect sized spy drones of the future could be made totally invisible to the naked eye, however.
Attacking missiles probably could do that. That's why you have the gatling gun mounted right next to the laser for the missiles that get through. And in any case, no weapon system can ever be a perfect counter to everything. There's always going to be trade-offs.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the Navy plans to use the energy weapon AND the conventional bullets in the same weapon system. The actual ships with these lasers will have BOTH. The reason they have both is because the laser is expected to have several times the effective range of the bullets so it'll be able to shoot at targets that are farther away, and THEN the conventional weapons will open up if the target missile or artillery round manages to get close enough.
I think a greater range is an overwhelming advantage and worth researching, assuming we are going to be spending billions of dollars on defense every year. The Navy also thinks it could be used to zap cheap UAVs and other low threat, slow targets at a long range without having to waste a multi-million dollar antiaircraft missile. (also, a laser shot would use up a trivial amount of the ship's fuel, while once a destroyer fires a missile that missile is gone until it can be reloaded)
This just in : spend $1200 on a graphics card and you'll get a card that destroys everything else on benchmarks! (til next month) And you'll have to wait 3 solid years before games are out that really need the card!
Film at 11.
All it takes to view these videos in their native resolution is a $60,000 4k monitor like the one available here : http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/676516-REG/Astro_Design_Inc_DM_3410_4K_x_2K_10.html
For a billionaire, 60 grand is not even 1/100 of a percent of their total fortune. Not to mention that they could have google pay for the screen because technically messing around with 4k resolution is a business expense....(even if Larry or Sergey were using it to view equine pornography)
Hydrogen isn't happening. The only reason there's any interest at all in elemental hydrogen as a form of energy storage is that it's a neat trick of chemistry that produces water as a product. But it's so much more convenient to attack those hydrogens to some carbon molecules. The easiest way to do this synthetically is to make methane/natural gas and use that. CNG vehicles are a mature technology that is not significantly more expensive than gasoline.
And of course, long chain hydrocarbons are an even better way to store hydrogen, in a nice compact liquid form like gasoline or diesel.
The article writers made 2 major mistakes that cause their results to be meaningless.
1. They didn't secure erase the drive, which is what actually puts a drive back into a virgin state. They instead wrote zeroes to every sector, which means that the drive controller probably still thinks those zeroed out sectors are still in use.
2. The Samsung drive controller has a form of self cleanup that greatly reduces the need for TRIM.
3. Regardless, the SSD they used was slow as a dog and barely worth using over a HDD.
The Soviets made an exact copy of the shuttle that flew and is completely automated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
A good case is an 'option' that appears to solve all the major problems with the iphone. A good case would protect the glass back from most impact and scratch damage, allow you to grip the phone better, and would insulate the metal antenna from your sweaty palms. Technically that means that the sweet industrial design of the phone would be semi-wasted since you are wrapping the hard glass and metal lines of the device in a swaddling of generic rubber.
The trouble is, most of these "problems" of your HAVE easy and readily achievable solutions. There just isn't the mainstream interest in the problem or the will to use the right solution.
-For malaria, drug companies could easily come up with several drugs that work together to block both malaria in it's current form and to effectively stop evolution of the parasite against the drug. If you want to know how this could be accomplished, reply and I'll explain. It would merely cost about a billion per drug, and would have to be paid for by the Western world, not the the people it would protect.
-Tons of ways for the energy production. Simplest to understand is wide scale nuclear built in a rational manner with the reactors located far from populated areas.
-I don't see mathematical puzzles as worth of solving if the solution accomplishes nothing of value. (but maybe break encryption, which will become moot in another decade once large scale flash memory storage is so cheap and ubiquitous that everyone uses one-time-pad for all important encryption)
-Feeding modern populations is again easy for those with modern societies. For a high tech society, we could eventually cover our country with 2 story greenhouses if we wanted. Again, the poor and backwards are a different problem that can't be solved with current engineering.
-Don't make me laugh about this mars question. A really really big spaceship, with nuclear fission power and vasimr thrusters. That would have enough specific impulse to ALSO carry a huge lander with enough fuel for a mars landing. We could get all their gear down first the way we do it now. For the ascent stage, we could use locally made compressed methane and liquid oxygen. Straightforward engineering, and readily achievable - so long as we don't have to pay for the bureaucratic overhead of the NASA way.
- We make the transistors smaller, the same way we've been doing incrementally for the last 30 years.
Import Tariffs. The United States would charge a tariff on Chinese goods made in factories that were not up to OSHA standards. The inspectors for these standards would be INDEPENDENT people probably chosen from an international pool.
This particular drug had no rational evidence for toxicity. It was an old drug candidate for something else back in the 70s, and in high dose testing on animals no lethal level was found. It did cure about 1 in 3 hospice patients during phase I trials. However, because it was for a rare type of cancer that only about 200 people have in the U.S. at any time, it was very difficult to secure the necessary funding for the next phase. As far as I know, my professor is still working on it.
What upset me was obvious : the people this drug is for will die almost 100% of the time within 2-3 years. A 1 in 3 chance of surviving is worth it, especially since even with the limited Phase I data, there were no adverse events detected. Basic math : if 30 or so randomly chosen people don't have adverse events, the rate of adverse events is fairly low within a 95% confidence interval. No further testing is needed : this drug isn't intended for anyone but people with a terminal illness, and there should be a way to put it into immediate use for that.
Wonder drug could save human lives left, right, and center. FDA won't approve it without decades of testing because it's "too risky" to try an experimental drug out on patients who are likely to die anyway. Film at 11.
Seriously, I've seen lectures in medical school by several researchers who ALSO have wonder drugs like this one. They can stick up a diagram showing exactly which molecular pathway it blocks in tumors. They can show Phase I results where 1 in 3 terminal patients in a hospice goes into complete remission from their cancer. Guess what...the drug still cannot be used...
This theory is ignorant, and wrong. Think about it for a second. Suppose you have a large population of sentients : not just individual beings, but competing societies and civilizations. Now, some of these populations succumb to the lures of computer games and fast food and porn more than others do. What does this cause? DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS. The invisible hand of evolution correcting the problem, again. This may ultimately mean that the eventually 'victors' in the recent rat race (USians) lose to other societies that are better at breeding. (such as India)
No, the reason we don't see SETI signals is obvious. IF alien species are within our light cone, they are using communication systems that are indistinguishable from noise, since maximizing entropy in a radio signal allows you to pack the most data into an available slice of spectrum.
But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)
Not NEARLY the same. In this, you're firing live rounds! A recoil, a powerful bang, real bullets go through cover, etc. Could even come up with a sport where it would be a lone man on the course with a real gun versus a team of people controlling the robots. Kinda a Rambo challenge, where if a robot manages to shoot the lone player with a paintball the robot wins.
Can any economists comment? This actually makes a kind of sense. If you ask a kid to do some work (actually actively studying to rapidly learn IS work) you gotta pay em. Society would benefit quite a bit more than paying the kids would cost if the kids were to learn what they need to learn on a faster timescale. I'm positive that if the funding were there, kids of average intelligence could easily enter college at age 16 if they were to actually work hard at learning. I certainly was ready then.
incorrect. We have big deposits of those same metals. google for it.
Well, inferior resources overall, but suddenly develops a breakthrough that allows the country to grow it's resources exponentially.
This is actually an interesting mental challenge. Could one posit a scenario where the U.S. military was actually defeated by an adversary that didn't have comparable technology and/or resources? Historically, it has happened. The Chinese forces the U.S. to retreat in the Korean war because they had ludicrous numbers of infantry troops in the field. However, the U.S. did manage to defeat their forces after regrouping. In Vietnam and in Iraq, the enemy has the means to send a lot of young men home in a body bag. However, the blunt truth is, American civilians can breed more young males, and the military can train em into soldiers faster than the enemy can kill us. A few thousand dead a year is not enough casualties that our military would actually run out of troops, no matter how long the war was.
The only scenario I thought of where this happens is where the enemy develops some kind of breakthrough, singularity level technology before the United States. Maybe red tape and government regulation stop U.S. researchers from developing the tech first. Strong AI or high end nanotechnology or something.
Typical DARPA. They'll put research funding into any idea that they've seen on Star Trek or read in a book somewhere.
The problem with "Cyber attacks" and "cyber space" is that they are too darn easy to defend against. Protecting your computers and hardware against a software virus is about as easy as protecting yourself from nerf gun darts. People get careless, and hackers get through, but it requires incompetence on the part of the system admins to not isolate critical systems from the damn internet. Most of the credit card processor breaches occurred because the company running it didn't put basic barriers in between the computers with the card data and the internal company network.
So it's kinda far fetched to plan on 0wnzoring your opponent's radars remotely by sending out data packets taking advantage of an exploit that your opponent can just patch with a firmware upgrade.
Because a lot of people do believe there are innate rights and wrongs, and use this belief to force laws on the rest of us that have no basis in actuality as to right and wrong.